Thresher
Tess Marie Donaldson, a.k.a. "Thresher" is the adopted daughter of the late Michael and Amber Donaldson. Unknown to her until the time of her adopted parents' death, she is in truth the biological daughter of the Greek God Poseidon and a Mako Shark. Appearance Short, stocky and powerfully built, Tess stands at only 4'10", weighing in around 135 pounds. She is athletic, muscular and not one inch of her very obviously inhuman body looks to be soft in the slightest. Her hair is a brilliant sea green, like the shallows off the Polynesian coastlines, while her eyes are an impenetrably deep black without obvious irises or sclera, very much like a shark's eyes. Her skin is a pale gray/blue-gray very similar to that of a mako shark, and has a very slightly rough quality to the touch, covered instead of body hair with the small dendrites of sharkskin. Her mouth is full of a single row of shark's teeth and powerful jaws to match. On the back of her hands are a pair of tattoos of tridents pointing towards her knuckles. She has a noteworthy lack of scars anywhere on her body, her skin almost perfect despite its roughness. She is definitely an athlete, showing little in the way of feminine endowments. Nearly flat as a board, it is possible with the way that she frequently dresses to mistake her as a boy at a glance. Due to obvious body consciousness, she tends to dress in jeans, sneakers and hoodies, with sunglasses covering her eyes. She does stand almost ramrod straight, without slouching, but her clothing choices are clearly meant to disguise her appearance and limit just how much of it is visible. Only when she is specifically planning on swimming for long periods does she dress in a fashion that shows more of her features, preferring skin-tight neoprene or other scuba gear. Tess' voice is a husky alto, at the low end of female chords and lacks much in the way of lyrical quality. It doesn't quite sound guttural, but there is always the faintest element of a growl in it. Her G's, H's and J's have a weak lisp to them, noticeable but not so much that it causes it to be difficult to understand her. She doesn't give a lot in the way of facial expressions, always looking just a little sour and irritated. This is partially because of her jawline. She has an easier time showing anger, though she tends to prefer not to do so because it shows off her teeth. Biology Tess is, despite her humanoid appearance, not even remotely human. She is half shark, half titan, and her biology reflects more that of a lesser child of one of the Greek Gods than it does any human being. She is healthier, stronger, faster, more robust and tougher than a human can possibly be by her very nature. Food borne pathogens and poisons are largely useless against her, unless they are somehow magically infused or improved beyond natural varieties to a significant degree. Other diseases and poisons are still unlikely to cause her serious problems, and she can barely remember the last time that she was ever sick. Like most of the titan race, she will show little to no sign of aging after reaching physical maturity around 20-21 years of age. No member of the Titan race has ever died of old age, only death by violence or some direct and natural cause bringing an end to any of their species. Tess, like her mako mother, is what is known as a hyper-carnivore. She will devour roughly 4 lb of meat in a day normally, and her digestive cycle takes somewhere on the order of two days to fully process. A look at her internal anatomy will find that her internal organs in the digestive track are very different, highly specialized and designed to cycle the food through her intestines until it is fully digested. She is capable of withstanding long periods without food with limited harm, probably about a month at the absolute outside, though there is some risk in this. Generally she prefers to maintain a consistent diet of raw or very lightly cooked meat. She has a respiratory system capable of switching between gill filtration of oxygen along gill slits that line the outside edges of her throat and regular breathing through her lungs. While on land, her gills close firmly, leaving only visible lines to show their presence. While in water they open up fully and Thresher is capable of breathing in both salt and fresh water with equal ease. Her senses are more advanced than most humans. Both her senses of sight and smell are significantly improved. She is capable of shifting and dilating her nearly invisible pupils to match the lighting conditions and see in total darkness with as much ease as bright daylight, though sudden changes can temporarily stun her. She has a very keen sense of smell, especially in water. Faint differences in the timing of odors are naturally detectable to her, allowing for a limited form of tracking by scent alone, one that is far more pronounced underwater. Powers & Abilities Thresher's Supernatural Powers, all derived from being the half-blooded daughter of the titan Poseidon, may be divided into physical capacities and magical abilities. ''Physical Powers '' Tess is considerably stronger and more durable than most humans. She is capable of dead-lifting one ton, with a bit of change when in a pinch. This incredible potency grants her not only the physical power to harm, break, bend and lift, but also leaping capacity of approximately 25 yards vertically and 50 yards horizontally. With this strength, along with the dendrites of her sharkskin, she is capable of swimming at incredible speeds, nearly 20 miles an hour. Her skin is not precisely bullet-proof, but it is heavily resistant to even modern firearms. Small-arms fire will produce little more than bruises and faint bruising to her skeletal structure, her tough skin diffusing the kinetic force similar to Kevlar. Rifles with sufficient caliber and heavy-bore pistols such as a Desert Eagle .50 caliber can penetrate, though they do far less harm than expected. She possesses a regenerative capacity, her body capable of either recovering from injury over the course of a day or two with relative ease, even significant harm. She can recover from major injuries in a short period of mere seconds, but doing so exhausts her and cannot be done more than once or twice in a day. Tess has greater balance and grace than the average human, but not to the significant degree that her strength and constitution display. She is hard to knock off of her balance, bordering on impossible without significant concussive force, and she can maintain that balance on precarious and small surfaces. Her land speed is that of a human athlete, while her speed beneath water has already been mentioned. ''Mystical Powers '' Tess has two powers of a more 'mystical quality:' Hydrokinesis and Animal Control. With her hydrokinesis, she is capable of wielding and controlling bodies of water in large volumes at a radius from her body of 20-30 yards at the extremities. These do not possess the same physical strength that she does, but are roughly as powerful as a normal weight-lifter and can generally lift about 200 lb. She is also capable of altering the physical state of water between vapor, liquid and solid, but is not capable of conjuring water from nothing. Her animal control allows her to communicate with and command the obedience of other sharks. She has a more limited level of control for fish and other sea life, being able to communicate in a rudimentary fashion with them, but not actually command them as she does sharks. Personality Tess is a gruff, diffident and occasionally difficult person. It isn't exactly that she is unfriendly by nature, but she is rarely comfortable around other people. Most of those who she was friends with in her younger life are already dead, and her few social contacts are in the Deviant community, and people with whom she feels that she has little in common. True, she shares a certain amount of innate selflessness with several so-called heroism, but that alone only rarely makes for cooler conversation. She doesn't really dwell on her vigilante moments as a source of personal revelation, even though she feels compelled to try and help people who are in dire straights, especially those threatened by other super-powered individuals. Instead, she would prefer to have actual interests, pursuits and commonality with others, something that she finds particularly difficult because she is almost hopelessly normal by many Deviant's standards, and hopelessly unnatural by normal peoples' standards. The end result of this is that Tess puts on an air of blunt, harsh cynicism with a thin veneer of humor mingled in. She is almost all business until she gets to know someone, and tends to conceal a lot about herself in terms of truly personal details. Getting a bit of info's easy, if it's the sort that will make working together easier, but getting personal details requires that she actually trusts a person, and that doesn't come easily. This doesn't stem so much from any sort of betrayal, but rather from the lack of common experiences that she has and her being accustomed to peoples' reactions to her inhuman appearance. She is extremely conscious of her appearance, in all ways, and almost completely despises it. Tess has attempted for large periods of her life to try and 'fit in' with the rest of the world, to be more or less human and to model and emulate others that she feels are more beautiful, beloved, trusted and cared for. In her youth, she attempted to use copious amounts of makeup to conceal her inhuman features, only to find the effort nearly impossible and give up on it in the long run. She, however, continues to have a certain love of cosplay, costumed events and similar occasions because she can appear to be 'just one of the crowd. She uses an online presence when the opportunity comes to her, even though she is really not very good at using a computer, simply because she can have normal conversations with people who never see her face to face. Normally, she will cover her hair with a hoodie, conceal her eyes with sunglasses, speak in such a way to keep her lips closed and her head a little down, hands in pockets. She will do literally anything to limit how much others notice of her inhuman nature, cooking her meat even though it tastes worse to her, avoiding close personal contact, or whatever it takes. Once her 'secret' is out, this habit doesn't change much without the insistence of another person and assurances that things are fine. Oddly, very little of this comes from crowds with pitchforks. There were a few incidents in her early life, but in truth the number of deeply unpleasant experiences in her life in interacting with humans is relatively small. Deviants are not unheard of, so people have always simply placed her as yet another Deviant, unconcerned about the details of her parentage. Her issues are internal, personal ones that stem from her body image over height, lack of femininity, stockiness and inhumanity. She has known that she isn't human, deep down, almost all her life and if there is one thing she would never admit to, she wishes that she was human. It bleeds into a lot of her interactions. In the end, most of her relationships are business-first and very direct in nature. She is prone to rebuffing socializing that doesn't pique her interests, or that doesn't somehow hold persistently enough to cut past her assumption that people are just going through the motions with her. Once past this, though, she has a pleasant, if somewhat crude and blue-collar sense of humor. Her hobbies include playing guitar, singing (badly), Hiking, Exploring, Swimming and Hunting. She tends to like doing physical-labor style jobs, though she has enough basic training to handle managing a small business and understands the basics of how the world around her works well enough to perform a wide variety of low-end jobs. Either way, she has a pronounced respect for the idea that a person should make themselves useful, something taught to her strongly by both of her parents. Gainful employment and being a productive member of society is deeply important to her, and there are numerous occasions where she will make comments about wanting to make her parents proud, or something similar. Tess is an opinionated soul, and she can be very direct in her wish to involve herself when she feels something is going wrong. For all of her body consciousness and difficulty getting to know others, if she feels that there's a wrong that needs righting, or if there's behavior that she feels should be commented on, she'll do it without much in the way of hesitation, thrusting her nose into other peoples' business. Despite this, and despite her habit of engaging in vigilante activities, she is not a fan of the spotlight and doesn't desire fame or reward for butting into others affairs, even if she does help save someone from a difficult situation. Knowing that she's done well is good enough for her, and she's prone to trying to extricate herself quickly. Her nom de guerre, "Thresher," is a press-created moniker and one that she hates, having little respect for 'professional superheroes,' and feeling a lot of them are little more than puffed up ego-maniacs like her biological father. There have been few people in her life that Thresher has truly cared about, chief among these being her 'real parents.' Were anyone to ask her who they were, it would be Michael and Amber Donaldson. Poseidon is a person that she mentions only begrudgingly, and only after someone insists that her perfectly natural and normal parents could not have been the source of her biology. He was not there for her, did not raise her and only cared about her when she was a useful pawn and her parents were dead. While they have common enemies at times, she cares nothing for him. Her adoptive parents, however, were loving, honest and hard-working souls, ones who raised her with kindness and treated her as a normal person every day of her life. She thinks the world of them and remembers them with a sad fondness. Her old childhood friend, Jim, was also someone for whom she cared a great deal. One of the few people who treated her like any other of his friends, she was used to getting into light trouble with him for years and thinks of the tragedy of his young death with a certain sadness. Generally, though, one of the easiest ways to cause her to give two figs about a person is for them to treat her, persistently, like a normal person rather than a monster, or a "Superhero." Yes, she's strong. Yes, she's able to wield water like a whip. She can talk to sharks and take a bullet and keep on coming. But, in the end she's just Tess, and someone who respects this fact wins a lot of points in her book, and has proven to be an exceedingly rare thing. Ethics and Religion In a loose sense, as Tess really isn't a very philosophical soul, she is a Deontologist with Neo-Pagan roots. raised a pagan reconstructionalist of the Greco-Roman religion, by two very devout pagans, she has always been familiar with the teachings and festivals of the Greco-Roman faith, with their mythologies and their gods. Since coming to terms with her parentage, she has ceased to be as actively religious, performing only those festivals that she actually personally enjoys. Much of the thin veneer of respect she had in her early youth for the gods of old has faded, seeing in them the pettiness that some of the myths spoke of. She venerates them in the sense that they represent the control over the world that each is tasked with, and for the role that they perform, but as she is now part of that mythology, however distantly, she feels little need to actually respect them, as their actions are not ones that she respects personally. It pains her to feel as she did, as her parents were deeply ardent in their faiths, and their gods are very much real beings, ones that Tess has recognized gave her to Michael and Amber because of their compassion and devotion. However, after seeing Poseidon for what she believes that he is, and opposing both Dionysus and Pan on occasion, Tess cannot help but view them in a far more negative sense. As a 'deontologist,' she loosely obeys teachings that actions must be moral in and of themselves. Doing evil things in the name of good causes, even if they get good results, is unacceptable to her. She was raised, generally, with the Golden Rule and a semi-traditional southern American set of morals. Many of the ancient Grecian practices are things that her parents accepted were in the past of their people, but they are also things that have genuinely been put into the past. Tess takes a basically non-malevolent view to life, that so long as long as she or other people aren't harmed, she would prefer not to bring harm to others, emotionally, physiically or spiritually, and a generally altruistic bent that it is a good thing to help others. However, outside of living by the Golden Rule and actively pursuing the protection and help of others, she has very little in the way of precisely coded ethics. She comes to strong, hip-shot decisions when it comes to ethical questions and tends to be quite stubborn unless someone can demonstrate the wrongness of them. Noteworthy in her issues, though, is a protectiveness of children in general, child abuse being one of her most serious issues and a good way to send her into a near berserk rage. History Early Life Born in late April of 1992, Tess was the biological daughter of the greek titan Poseidon, mating with a Mako Shark. Little is known as to the precise reasons for Poseidon's choice to mate, but given the sexual proclivities of the Greco-Roman gods, it could have been any of a number of reasons from a lost wager, to a random fascination to some twisted curse wrecked by an angry Nereid. Poseidon never spoke of the reasons, and when the shark spawned its young, he became aware of the child and sought her out within the waves, bearing her up and giving her to loyal worshipers of his along the South Carolina coastline. Michael and Amber Donaldson, married then for ten years, had known for a long time that they would never have children due to an injury in Michael's youth. Having given up on the idea of children, they were grateful that their prayers were answered and cared for Tess as their own, promising to rear her well until the time that her father came to claim her for greater deeds. Tess' life was, for almost nineteen years, fairly close to idyllic. She lived along the coast at an old and largely forgotten lighthouse maintained by the tenuous grant money the state afforded it as a historical monument. She was homeschooled by her mother, but not kept completely apart from the nearby community. "Deviants" were not unheard of, and the Donaldsons claimed that their adopted daughter was merely another genetic mutation, but at the same time beautiful in her own way. Adjustment from the community was hit and miss at best, but prior to the events of the 21st century, most sentiment towards Deviants was fairly mild, and not prone to outright negativity. Though there was the occasional teasing and Tess was frequently left out of the gathering of her peers, she was not overtly shunned. Perhaps not the most intelligent of souls, Tess was a hard worker and pressed through both her studies and the practical tasks of helping her father tend to the Lighthouse's care. By the time of her nineteenth birthday, she had achieved an associate's degree in business through an online courseload, something that she felt would help the family out in maintaining the financial costs of the Lighthouse as her father grew older. She made the occasional friends, the closest of whom was Jim Henseworth, a local ragamuffin who really wasn't likely to ever amount to much of anything, but who at the same time was considered largely harmless by his neighbors. Most of the others, as time passed, began to move from the community, filtering away as small, rural communities often see their youth do. Tess, for her part, had little interest in departing for 'greater things' in those days. Other deviants participated in their vigilante games, sparring with so-called supervillains, but so long as the community she lived in was not threatened, she took no part in them. If a street tough tried to cause trouble when she was around, she would mildly pluck them up by the scruff of their neck and laugh when they attempted to shoot her, waiting for the cops. Anything more, though, she had no interest in doing. Hers was meant, in her mind, to be a simple life, one full of swimming, had and simple labor and just being a good, regular person... who occasionally went to conventions so that she felt more or less normal amongst the other costumed sorts. By and large, though she still frequently dressed in ways to avoid notice despite much of the town knowing exactly who she was, Tess was left to her own devices through much of her life, until near the rise of Psi-Void. The locals felt a certain distrust for her obvious inhumanity, but she didn't try to mate with their sons and rarely caused much of a fuss, so they were comfortable to leave her be. Besides, the last time anyone attempted to convince to sheriff to intervene, he had not-so-politely reminded them that he didn't own a gun that could actually hurt the girl, nor was the local lockup designed to hold someone with her strength if she wanted to leave. She wasn't breaking any laws, so they could suck a railroad spike. 2011 - "Maximum Destruction" Matters first began to change for Tess during Psi-Void's first attempted invasion of Earth. Cy-Droids, sent to capture Deviants around the world, did not arrive in her sleepy little community initially, and so news reports were beginning to filter in about the attacks that were occurring. As a result of this, Thresher publicly informed the sheriff and her parents that she would, at least initially, be going deep underwater off the coast, so as to protect the town from being attacked by Cy-Droids. Tess remained within a range where she could determine if attacks were coming to the town regardless of her having vacated, communicating with aquatic life for reports in their limited understanding to ensure that she was aware of what occurred above water. Thankfully the first wave of attacks passed by without incident. Though Cy-Droids did initially investigate the community, they found no signs of Deviant life within their scans and departed with little threat. In the aftermath of the first wave, as heroes waged war in the orbital station that was used for a prison to contain them, Tess emerged from the waters to find a greater number of Cy-Droids beginning to make their presence known on the earth. Where her presence had been a threat, her adoptive parents told her that now the lack of it was far more of one. Knowing that she couldn't stand idly by, they gave her their blessing and told her to go. Thresher departed and swam to some of the heavier fighting along the Georgia coastline further south. She made her first name for herself, acquiring the moniker "Thresher" for her similarity to a shark and her habit of tearing into the robotic menaces with her teeth as much as she did with her hands. When Psi-Void was defeated and heroes began to descend, Tess made an effort to slip back out of the public eye. She was aided by the rise of the so-called Thunder Force at around the same time, public defenders meant to represent the greatest of humanity in the face of dire threats such as the alien menaces of the Sovereign race and now Psi-Void and his minions. It gave her the chance to slip away, largely unnoticed while others rose to prominence. However, deep in her heart she was becoming increasingly aware that she could not avoid the spotlight forever, and though grateful for her aid many of those she met in other places were obviously fearful and distrustful of her alien appearance... the very thing she knew deep down would happen. 2012 - "Sins of My Father" & "Freedom War" 2012 was arguably the worst year in Tess' life. No matter how bad things got during the rising of Omega, Tess was deeply scarred by the realities she was forced to face the previous year. Both of her adoptive parents and much of the town were plagued by a rampant and virulent fever. The disease, a variant of influenza, struck hard and fast and claimed easily a hundred lives in the community during January and February. Michael and Amber's death shook Tess to her core and left her aimless, without a real plan. Though both were older, having both married and adopted later in life, she had expected them to live well into retirement. Now, forced to see them dwindle away and die such a sad death left her full of sadness and unresolved emotions. Added to this, with the damage of the Psi-Void invasion, federal funding to parks and historical sites had begun to be cut, causing fears to exist of the Lighthouse's closure. Without her father there to champion it's cause, she was not surprised to receive the notice of its eminent seizure in the coming summer months. She had lost not only her parents but her home. The night of the funeral, Tess was alone on the lighthouse balcony, watching the stars while the light shone out into the distance. A presence made itself known to her, that of her biological father. At first, the conversation was flecked with ardent disbelief. She had known herself not to be a normal human, and destined for greater things according to her parents, but the idea that she was a daughter of a god was shocking to her. Worse still, she was daughter to a god who had abandoned her to this world, and who had the temerity to come for her on the night that her 'real parents' had been laid to rest with Charon's coins placed over their lips. She railed at him in rage and anger, both for his timing and his choice to leave her unwanted in the arms of those who had cared for her all these years. He had no right to call her daughter, nor any right to demand anything of her. The two parted ways initially, though not for very long. Tess hit the road with a guitar in hand and New York CIty in her eyes. It was a change of pace and an escape from the life that she'd lived. News that her best friend Jim had died in an accident because of a drunk driver only sealed the deal for her. There was nothing left for her in South Carolina. She left behind a few notes of thanks to those who had been kinder to her, and held a quick estate sale before leaving, but when she did it was to shake the dust of the town from her shoes once and for all. While journeying, though, her father came again. He protested that she was needed, that one of his Nereids, Ione, had been kidnapped and was in desperate danger, that because of his responsibilities he could not be directly involved for fear of dire consequences and that the agency of a younger member of the titan's race would be needed to bring her back safely. Finally, she relented in great aggravation. She would rescue the Ione, but for her sake and not his. Learning that her task would still take her to the Big Apple, she continued on it with a purpose in mind, and a growing chip on her shoulder. New York City, when she arrived, was boiling over with controversy over the recent fall from grace of Thunder Force member Pixel. The living computer program had gone haywire and attacked a helpless town. Though he had turned himself in after his copies had been captured, wanting to cause no more harm, a fervor among the people was spreading that so-called Deviants needed to be registered and contained, assets to be controlled lest they harm the populace. Tess kept as low a profile as she could while the conflict mounted, sticking to odd jobs, low-life taverns and dingy accommodations while she researched Ione's last known locations. Eventually, she found where Ione was being held, a bar in El Barrio in the north of the metro area. It was at "Palanquin" that she found far more than she bargained for. Ione was not the captive that her father had claimed, though she was being held in the heady, smoke-laden bar through a heavy use of drugs and aphrodisiacs by a man who introduced himself as Dionysus. The god of wine offered her the chance to see Ione and that all was perfectly well, that she would be returned to her father when the time came, but at the same time Tess could see the drugged out look in the girl's eyes. So long as she was there, drinking the oinos of the God of Wine and Revelry, she would never wish to leave. Demanding her return, she found herself accosted by a feral, bandage-wrapped satyr of great strength, Dionysus' old friend and associate Pan. The two fought to a near standstill, until the ruckus threatened police intervention. Pan disappeared shortly afterwards and Dionysus released Ione, thanking Tess for the show and warning her that they would meet again one day. Thresher barely escaped the conflagration with the girl in tow before agents of RAPTOR descended, looking for Deviant involvement to contain. She helped Ione return to herself, detoxing the Nereid before she returned her to Poseidon. Doing so, she learned that it had indeed been her choice to go to Dionysus' side, though she had found it increasingly difficult to leave, and had long wished to do so. The conversations were telling about the internal, petty politics of the gods as they prattled about their greater tasks. Tess followed Ione's request and returned her to her father, walking away as he prepared to give her a new task. "Tell me when you have something the world really needs," she said. "I'm tired of cleaning up your petty grudges." Though furious, Poseidon let the matter lay. She would live far too long to press the matter. As events in the Freedom War boiled over to final conflicts between Freedom Fighters at the side of Vigil and RAPTOR's agents, duped by the villain known as "The Hive," Tess remained outside of the direct conflict. She publicly registered herself, though under stringent protest against the demand. When the Freedom War concluded shortly afterwards, Tess left the company of RAPTOR and sought employment back in New York City, trying to live a relatively quiet life and somehow find a way to cope with the difficulties posed by not only her existence but recent tragedies. 2013 - "Omega Rising" For the most part, Tess was successful in making a life for herself in the outskirts of Queens. Regular employment wasn't impossible to find, and as long as she was careful to keep her vigilante moments outside of the city limits when trying to keep the streets relatively safe from super villain activity, most people were happy enough to deal with her at arm's length. She kept in touch with the local police and rarely involved herself more than barely necessary, so as to maintain a fairly low profile. Despite her best wishes, the nickname "Thresher" had stuck by now, and she was a publicly known heroine and used as an example of what was possible when Deviants tried to be helpful while being mindful of those that they protected. For close to a year, it all went according to plan, right up until the Dark Legion unleashed the demigod Omega from his transdimensional prison. Tess was embroiled the moment it began in conflict with a slew of relatively minor villains empowered by the Dark Energy Omega released to all those who would serve him. Suddenly bearing enough power to threaten her, they kept her hard pressed to protect the city, right up until the moment that Pan entered the scene. The old, wounded satyr wanted revenge for the slights he had felt at her hands, and it was only by diving into the sea, swimming far out and into the depths, that Tess was able to stay alive at all. While the desperate plight against Omega reached its crescendo, Tess remained in the heart of the ocean, recuperating from her own wounds and brooding over the change in the situation. All the good she had done had been undone in almost no time and her life nearly ended over what had been a petty grievance. It was in this state of bitterness that the Genocide Wave erupted and washed over her. The backwash of RAPTOR's doomsday protocol, intended to transport only Omega from this reality and ultimately transporting all Deviants from the reality temporarily, struck her and caused her to disappear from time and space for the remainder of the year, only re-appearing in late 2013, around the time of the Saturnalia and Yule festivals, to find that humanity now struggled even more in the aftermath of the devastating attacks of the Omega War, as it was now called. Devants were seen by many as threats, creatures to be feared, and in that fear she sought the solace of the seas, away from the hatred. 2014 - "Heroes United" wip 2015 - "The Cult of Omega" wip Key Relationships WIP